Hi. Im very new to Maya and I have my first model ready. However I have a real tough time texturing it. I manage to change the layer(lambert) color to the texture but I cant really align it where i want it. Also the model needs to have 3 different textures on it on different places. Ive googled around on this but seems everyone does it different way and I dont know which one is best suited for my project. Here I include a screenshot of the models. Its the mushrooms from the super mario bros game.

Suggestions on how to proceed and/or link to good information appreciated.'

Agreed, getting familiar with the basics is a must, Maya layers are very different from Maya shader/materials so that in itself could have been a source of confusion.

Also, did you change the "lambert1" color? If thats the case, you may want to change it back to default gray and avoid editing that in the future because every new piece of geometry you create will use that material automatically and it could prove to be really annoying to have have every sphere, cube you make in that scene be mushroom colored be default lol.

Thanks for the replies.. I read that tutorial. Seems to be kinda what Im looking for. Im looking here on the UV unfolding. They seem to cut the mesh into smaller parts to texture them with seperate images. Is that a must?

It's not actually cutting the mesh itself, it's cutting apart the "UV coordinates" into different shells. The terminology is confusing, but you're basically working with texture-space, not the geometry itself. Different selections of faces can be mapped with different textures. Hope that helps.

in a nutshell texture mapping is when you map a point in 3D space to 2D space. You should hopefully be familiar with 2D space from school. 'Mapping between two points' should be pretty self explanatory, but if it isn't then in this context it means that you take a point in 3D and put it to 2D. The vertex will have the colour of the texture at that point in 2D. If two points on a mesh are mapped to the same point in 2D space then they will have the same colour.

you might be able to figure out why you "cut the mesh" from that. You don't generally want UV's of the same mesh to 'overlap' with each other. Take a look at some of the texturing videos here, you'll start to get the idea behind it

Well I think I understand how it works. The idea is pretty simple. But from my understanding using "extract" on a mesh parts it into smaller pieces. I dont mean the uv shells (which ofc doesnt affect the meshs geo) I mean that they did actually cut the mesh into pieces in that tutorial using extract. When I did extract on my mushroom head it became (seamingly at least) a seperate mesh.

oh right, you saw someone use extract and then gave each piece different materials? or they just used extract to create different 'UV shells'?
extract, depending on the settings, will separate faces from the mesh and either keep them as part of the mesh or separate them.
i've never seen anyone use extract to create different UV shells, but no, that isn't a must when laying out UVs.

About Us

A little bit about who we are

People we like

Links you might find useful

Connect with

Catch up with SimplyMaya

SimplyMaya specialises in Maya tutorials. We offer over 1,000 individual Maya training videos, ranging from basic Maya tutorials through to intermediate Maya tutorials. Our tutorials are created by instructors with industry experience and are designed to get you up and running in Maya quickly without making it seem like hard work.